eBook

Navigating
DevOps
What it is and why it matters
to you and your business

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eBook Navigating DevOps: Learn What It Is and Why It Matters To Your Business

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION 03

CHAPTER 1 : What Is DevOps? 04

CHAPTER 2 : Where Did DevOps Come From? 06

CHAPTER 3 : What Problems Led to the Creation of DevOps? 08

CHAPTER 4 : How Does DevOps Work? 10

CHAPTER 5 : Whos Adopting DevOps? 14

CHAPTER 6: Why Are Your Peers Embracing DevOps? 16

CHAPTER 7: How Will I Benefit from DevOps? 20

CONCLUSION 22

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eBook Navigating DevOps: Learn What It Is and Why It Matters To Your Business

Introduction
There are as many opinions about DevOps as there are commentators,
but one thing is undeniable: DevOps is real. In a few short years, head-
lines about DevOps have gone from What the F--- Is DevOps? 1 and
DevOps Is a Poorly Executed Scam2 to The New Normal of DevOps3
and Three Reasons Your Startup Will Suffer Without DevOps.4 From
tiny startups to giant Fortune 500 enterprises, the IT industry is adopt-
ing DevOps at an amazing rate.

And yet, the majority of IT professionals either dont know anything

about DevOps or just have a general understanding of the big picture.
If you fall into either of those categories, this discussion is meant for
you. In the following pages, we answer a number of basic questions
questions that probably sound much like your own:5

What is DevOps?
Where did it come from?
What problems led to DevOps?
How does DevOps work?
How widely used is DevOps today?
Why are people adopting DevOps?
What are the benefits?

1 James Turnbull, What the F*** is DevOps?, blog post, https://coderwall.com/p/zhf8gq, May 2010.
2 Ted Dziuba, Devops is a Poorly Executed Scam, blog post, http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2011/03/devops-scam.html, March 2011.
3 The New Normal of DevOps, CA Technologies White Paper, http://www.ca.com/us/~/media/Files/whitepapers/the-new-normal-of-devops.pdf, December 2013.
4 Three Reasons Your Startup Will Suffer Without DevOps, Readwrite, http://readwrite.com/2014/01/01/three-reasons-your-startup-needs-devops-or-else.
5 Damon Edwards, The History of DevOps,IT Revolution Press, http://itrevolution.com/the-history-of-devops.

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CHAPTER 1

What Is DevOps?

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eBook Navigating DevOps: Learn What It Is and Why It Matters To Your Business

What Is DevOps?
The word DevOps itself was coined in 2009 by Patrick Debois,
who became one of its gurus. The term was formed by combin-
ing development and operations, which provides a starting
point for understanding exactly what people mean when they say
DevOps. Notably, DevOps isnt a process or a technology or a stan-
dard. Many devotees refer to DevOps as a culturea term that
New Relic favors. We also use the term DevOps movement when
talking about topics such as adoption rates and trends for the future
and DevOps environment to refer to an IT organization that has
adopted DevOps culture.

This primer will have a great deal more to say about DevOps, but to Successful DevOps is mutual respect
get started, we need a serviceable definition: between development and operations. You
deliver quality code and Ill deliver a quality
DevOps (a portmanteau of development and operations) is a soft- platform to run that code. We can have dif-
ware development method that stresses communication, collabora- ferences of opinion about how to do it, but
tion and integration between software developers and information at the end of the day, we are together going
technology (IT) operations professionals.6 to deliver software that performs as adver-
tised and meets our customers needs.7
Mike Surma, DevOps Engineer, Rackspace

6 Big Data Drives Rapid Changes in Infrastructure and $232 Billion in IT Spending Through 2016, Gartner Research, October 2012.
7 Interview, March 13, 2014

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CHAPTER 2

Where Did DevOps

Come From?

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eBook Navigating DevOps: Learn What It Is and Why It Matters To Your Business

Where Did DevOps Come From?

Despite the mythical tone of some of the stories about its origins, DevOps pioneer with 15 years of system administration
DevOps was not created out of whole cloth. Rather, the seeds of experience, shaking up the operations side of the house
DevOps were planted long ago and have been nurtured by forward- was long overdue:
thinking IT experts in a number of disciplines. One commentator calls
DevOps a perfect storm,8 and theres plenty of evidence to back System administrators have allowed themselves to lag in
that up. The two primary antecedents of DevOps are: maturity behind what the state of the art is. These new
technologies are finally causing us to be held to account
Enterprise systems management (ESM). Many of the to modernize the way we do things. And I think thats a
people involved in the initial definition of DevOps were welcome and healthy challenge.11
system administrators. These operations experts brought
key ESM best practices to DevOps, including configuration Why does this matter? It goes to the basic credibility of the move-
management, system monitoring, automated provisioning, ment. Far from being some outlandish manifesto of a few IT geeks,
and the toolchain approach. DevOps is actually quite mainstream in its origins. DevOps unites
an established IT operations discipline with a proven development
Agile development. One observer calls DevOps agile on methodologyeach half of the acronym represents the best practices
steroids. 9 DevOps incorporates a number of agile principles, of its craft. And that union mirrors the fact that DevOps integrates
methods, and practices such as continuous delivery, development and operations into a single-minded entity with com-
continuous integration, and collaboration. 10 DevOps brings mon goals: high-quality software, faster releases, and improved
agile principles to system administration and ultimately customer satisfactionagain, totally mainstream enterprise concerns.
to the full spectrum of IT operations. In the words of one

8 Ernest Mueller, What is DevOps? the agile admin, http://theagileadmin.com/what-is-devops (December 2011).
9 Aniket Deshpande, DevOps an Extension of Agile Methodology How It will Impact QA?, Software Testing Help, http://www.softwaretestinghelp.com/devops-and-software-testing.
10 Jack Crews,Agile Values, Principles and Practices, online presentation, http://www.slideshare.net/jackcrews/agile-values-principles-and-practices.
11 Ernest Mueller, Q&A: Ernest Mueller on Bringing Agile to Operations, http://dev2ops.org/2010/04/qa-ernest-mueller-on-bringing-agile-to-operations, 2010.

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CHAPTER 3

What Problems Led

to the Creation of
DevOps?

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eBook Navigating DevOps: Learn What It Is and Why It Matters To Your Business

What Problems Led to

the Creation of DevOps?
Developers and system administrators dont see eye to eye on a lot of DevOps was created to resolve this dilemma by integrating everyone
things, but they do agree that their customers on the business side of associated with software development and deploymentbusiness
the house frequently pull them in two different directions. On the one users, developers, test engineers, system administratorsinto a single,
hand, business users demand changenew features, new services, highly automated workflow with a laser focus: Rapid delivery of high-
new revenue streamsas fast as possible. At the same time, they also quality software that meets all user requirements while maintaining
want a system that is stable and free from interruptions. That creates the integrity and stability of the entire system.
a problem:
How do these disparate groups join forces? By subscribing to a com-
The problem with the traditional software delivery process mon set of principles that transcends traditional discipline boundaries
(or the lack thereof) is that it is not well adapted to support and roles, for example:
these two requirements simultaneously. So companies have to
choose between either delivering changes fast and ending up Ensure all teams are working towards the same goal and are being
with a messy production environment or keeping a stable but measured by the same business metrics.
outdated environment.12 Maintain short development cycles that enable the business to
pivot quickly with changing requirements.
Not surprisingly, neither choice is acceptable to enterprise executives. Utilize feature flags and progressive deployment strategies that
And more importantly, neither allows a business to provide the best make it easy to enable or disable new features in production
solutions it can to its customers. without re-deployments.
Create extremely fast feedback loops that allow for almost
Developers are all too willing to push out software faster and faster immediate problem identification and remediation by the
after all, thats what they are typically hired to accomplish. Opera- appropriate teams.
tions, on the other hand, knows that rapid-fire changes without proper Reflect on how to become more effective as a team, then tune and
safeguards threaten to destabilize the system, which goes directly adjust your behavior accordingly.13
against their charter.

12 Niek Bartholomeus, My experience with introducing DevOps in a traditional enterprise, http://niek.bartholomeus.be/2013/01/28/introducing-a-devops-culture-in-a-traditional-enterprise, January 28, 2013.
13 Ernest Mueller, A DevOps Manifesto, the agile admin, http://theagileadmin.com/2010/10/15/a-devops-manifesto, October 15, 2010.

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CHAPTER 4

How Does
DevOps Work?

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eBook Navigating DevOps: Learn What It Is and Why It Matters To Your Business

How Does DevOps Work?

Like all cultures, DevOps has many variations on the theme. How- DevOps relies on toolchains to automate large parts of the end-to-end
ever, most observers would agree that the following capabilities are software development and deployment process.
common to virtually all DevOps cultures: collaboration, automation,
continuous integration, continuous delivery, continuous testing, con- Caveat: Because DevOps tools are so amazingly awesome, theres a
tinuous monitoring, and rapid remediation. tendency to see DevOps as just a collection of tools. While its true
that DevOps relies on tools, DevOps is much more than that.

Collaboration
Instead of pointing fingers at each other, development and IT opera- Continuous Integration
tions work together (no, really). While the disconnect between these You usually find continuous integration in DevOps cultures because

two groups created the impetus for its creation, DevOps extends DevOps emerged from agile culture, and continuous integration is a

far beyond the IT organization, because the need for collaboration fundamental tenet of the agile approach:

extends to everyone with a stake in the delivery of software (not just

between Dev and Ops, but all teams, including test, product manage- Continuous integration (CI) is a software engineering practice in

ment, and executives): which isolated changes are immediately tested and reported on
when they are added to a larger code base. The goal of CI is to pro-
vide rapid feedback so that if a defect is introduced into the code
Successful DevOps requires business, development, QA, and oper-
base, it can be identified and corrected as soon as possiblethe
ations organizations to coordinate and play significant roles at dif-
usual rule is for each team member to submit work on a daily (or
ferent phases of the application lifecycle. It may be difficult, even
more frequent) basis and for a build to be conducted with each
impossible, to eliminate silos, but collaboration is essential.14
significant change.15

Automation The continuous integration principle of agile development has a cul-

DevOps relies heavily on automationand that means you need
tural implication for the development group. Forcing developers to
tools. Tools you build. Tools you buy. Open source tools. Proprietary
integrate their work with other developers frequentlyat least daily
tools. And those tools are not just scattered around the lab willy-nilly:
exposes integration issues and conflicts much earlier than is the case

14 Laurie Wurster et al, Emerging Technology Analysis: DevOps a Culture Shift, Not a Technology, Gartner report, August 2013.
15 Margaret Rouse, Continuous Integration (CI), SearchSoftwareQuality, http://searchsoftwarequality.techtarget.com/definition/continuous-integration, July 2008.

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eBook Navigating DevOps: Learn What It Is and Why It Matters To Your Business

with waterfall development. However, to achieve this benefit, devel- around by not only automating much of the test process but also
opers have to communicate with each other much more frequently redefining test methodologies:
something that runs counter to the image of the solitary genius coder
working for weeks or months on a module before she is ready to Rather than making test a separate and lengthy sequence in the
send it out in the world. That seed of open, frequent communication larger deployment process, continuous delivery practitioners roll
blooms in DevOps. out small upgrades almost constantly, measure their performance,
and quickly roll them back as needed.18
Continuous Testing
The testing piece of DevOps is easy to overlookuntil you get Although it may come as a surprise, the operations function has an

burned. As one industry expert puts it, The cost of quality is the important role to play in testing and QA:

cost of failure. 16 While continuous integration and delivery get the

lions share of the coverage, continuous testing is quietly finding its Operations has access to production usage and load patterns.

place as an equally critical piece of DevOps. These patterns are essential to the QA team for creating a load test
that properly exercises the application.19
Continuous testing is not just a QA function, in fact, it starts in the
development environment. The days are over when developers Operations can also ensure that monitoring tools are in place and test

could simply throw the code over the wall to QA and say, Have at environments are properly configured. They can participate in func-

it. In a DevOps environment, everyone is involved in testing. Devel- tional, load, stress, and leak tests and offer analysis based on their

opers make sure that, along with delivering error-free code, they experience with similar applications running in production.

provide test data sets. They also help test engineers configure the
testing environment to be as close to the production environment The payoff from continuous testing is well worth the effort. The test

as possible.17 function in a DevOps environment helps developers to balance qual-

ity and speed. Using automated tools reduces the cost of testing and
On the QA side, the big need is speed. After all, if the QA cycle takes allows test engineers to leverage their time more effectively. Most
days and weeks, youre right back into a long, drawn out waterfall importantly, continuous testing shortens test cycles by allowing inte-
kind of schedule. Test engineers meet the challenge of quick turn- gration testing earlier in the process.

16 Wayne Ariola, SYS-CON.tv interview at the 13th International Cloud Expo, http://devopssummit.sys-con.com/node/2912573, Nov 4-7, 2013.
17 Sanjeev Sharma, Understanding DevOps Part 4: Continuous Testing and Continuous Monitoring, blog post, http://sdarchitect.wordpress.com/2012/10/30/understanding-devops-part-4-continuous-testing-and-continuous-monitoring , October 2012.
18 http://www.pwc.com/us/en/technology-forecast/2013/issue2/features/devops-continuous-delivery.jhtml.
19 Jim Hirschauer, DevOps Scares Me Part 4: Dev and Ops Collaborate Across the Lifecycle, DZone, http://java.dzone.com/articles/devops-scares-me-part-4-dev, August 2013.

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eBook Navigating DevOps: Learn What It Is and Why It Matters To Your Business
Continuous testing also eliminates testing bottlenecks through virtu-
alized dependent services, and it simplifies the creation of virtualized
test environments that can be easily deployed, shared, and updated
as systems change. These capabilities reduce the cost of provisioning
and maintaining test environments, and they shorten test cycle times
by allowing integration testing earlier in life cycle.
Continuous Delivery
In the words of one commentator, continuous delivery is nothing
but taking this concept of continuous integration to the next step.21
Instead of ending at the door of the development lab, continuous
integration in DevOps extends to the entire release chain: including
QA and operations. The result is that individual releases are far less
complex and come out much more frequently.
The actual release frequency varies greatly depending on the com-
panys legacy and goals. For example, one Fortune 100 company
improved its release cycle from once a year to once a quartera
release rate that seems glacial compared to the hundreds of releases
an hour achieved by Amazon.
Exactly what gets released varies as well. In some organizations,
QA and operations triage potential releases: many go directly to
users, some go back to development, and a few simply are not
deployed at all. Other companiesFlickr is a notable example
push everything that comes from developers out to users and
20 Enterprise testing capability for continuous software delivery, http://www.ibm.com/ibm/devops/us/en/build/test/.
21 Sanjeev Sharma, Understanding DevOps Part 2: Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery, blog post, http://sdarchitect.wordpress.com/2012/09/25/understanding-devops-part-2-continuous-integration-and-continuous-delivery, September 2012.
22 Julien Pivotto, The devops approach to monitoring, Open World Forum presentation, http://www.slideshare.net/roidelapluie/devops-andmonitoringowf13, October 2013.
13 2014 New Relic, Inc
count on real-time monitoring and rapid remediation to minimize
the impact of the rare failure.
Continuous Monitoring
Given the sheer number of releases, theres no way to implement the
20
kind of rigorous pre-release testing that characterizes waterfall devel-
opment. Therefore, in a DevOps environment, failures must be found
and fixed in real time. How do you do that? A big part is continuous
monitoring.
According to one pundit, the goals of continuous monitoring are
to quickly determine when a service is unavailable, understand the
underlying causes, and most importantly, apply these learnings to
anticipate problems before they occur. 22 In fact, some monitoring
experts advocate that the definition of a service must include moni-
toringthey see it as integral to service delivery.
Like testing, monitoring starts in development. The same tools that
monitor the production environment can be employed in development
to spot performance problems before they hit production.
Two kinds of monitoring are required for DevOps: server monitor-
ing and application performance monitoring. Monitoring discussions
quickly get down to tools discussions, because there is no effective
monitoring without the proper tools. For a list of DevOps tools (and
more DevOps-related content), visit New Relics DevOps Hub.
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CHAPTER 5

Whos Adopting
DevOps?

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eBook Navigating DevOps: Learn What It Is and Why It Matters To Your Business

Whos Adopting DevOps?

DevOps adoption is accelerating. A December 2012 study of more Take the big guys first. Ask a dozen DevOps converts to name the
than 4,000 IT professionals found that 63% of respondents had biggest success stories in DevOps and most will give the same four
implemented DevOps practices, an astonishing 26% increase over the or five names: Google, Twitter, Amazon, Netflix, and Facebook. Their
previous year. 23 While not yet a mainstream trend, DevOps is clearly combined market capitalization of more than USD $717 billion in 2014
gaining momentum. 24 exceeds the GDP of all but 19 countries in the world. Many indus-
try watchers believe that DevOpsor something that looks a lot like
What kinds of companies areor should beembracing DevOps? DevOpshas been an essential component in their meteoric growth.
It depends on who you ask. One school of thought sees DevOps as These are the breakout successes that could only be possible with a
the right answer for everybody, from small startups to tech giants: new operating philosophyTheir success in many ways is a roadmap
DevOps is now a way of life and ignoring it can make or break a for how DevOps can succeed at all different sizes of organizations.27
company of any size. 25
On the other end of the spectrum are the hip, slick, and cool
Others contend that size mattersa lot. According to this view, startups and medium-sized businessesTumblr, Evernote, Etsy, and
DevOps is a piece of cake for smaller companies, but the culture of Github, to name a fewwho play with the big boys in large part
the large corporation may be a significant problem: If good collabo- because DevOps helps them leverage small teams into outsized rev-
ration is missing from the DNA of the company, it will take more time enues: Traditional IT processes and product development method-
and effort to introduce DevOps successfully.26 ologies werent going to help these small companies punch above
their weight.28
The plain fact is that DevOps is evolving so rapidly that its difficult
even to characterize the level of adoption in any meaningful way.
However, theres plenty of evidence showing that size by itself is no
predictor of DevOps success.

23 2013 State of DevOps Report, Puppet Labs and IT Revolution Press, https://puppetlabs.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/2013-state-of-devops-report.pdf.
24 Kyt Dotson, DevOps Interview: Raja Bhargava, CEO of JumpCloud http://devopsangle.com/2014/01/07/devops-interview-rajat-bhargava-ceo-of-jumpcloud/.
25 Adam Duro, Three Reasons Your Startup Will Suffer Without DevOps, readwrite, http://readwrite.com/2014/01/01/three-reasons-your-startup-needs-devops-or-else, January 01, 2014.
26 The New Normal of DevOps, CA Technologies White Paper, http://www.ca.com/us/~/media/Files/whitepapers/the-new-normal-of-devops.pdf, December 2013.
27 James B. Brown, 5 Reasons Why DevOps is Hitting Its Stride, Innovation Insights, http://insights.wired.com/profiles/blogs/5-reasons-why-devops-is-hitting-its-stride#ixzz2x6O8QnIA, March.
28 Ibid.

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CHAPTER 6

Why Are Your Peers

Embracing DevOps?

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eBook Navigating DevOps: Learn What It Is and Why It Matters To Your Business
Why Are Your Peers
Embracing DevOps?
DevOps has something for everyone in the software chain: develop-
ers, operations, and testing. Furthermore, DevOps even touches the
business side of the house: managers who monetize the software and
executives who worry about the bottom line. Here are some of the
benefits cited by each group.
Developers
Automated provisioning is a big win for programmers, because they
can stand up a development environment themselves with no paper-
work, no lengthy approval cycles, no waiting for IT to provision a
serverno lost time. When developers can provision a working envi-
ronment in 15 minutes, with all the right resourcescompute power,
storage, network, applicationsit changes the way that they work.
They can be far more creative and innovative. Its much easier to try
multiple options, run different scenarios, and test their code more
thoroughly.
When developers first begin to work in a DevOps world, one real
eye-opener for many is understanding just what goes on inside that
black box labeled Operations. That knowledge helps developers
work effectively with operations in a joint problem-solving mode.
Problems are resolved faster and cause fewer distractions. Best of
17 2014 New Relic, Inc | US +888-643-8776
all, the frantic late-night phone call becomes a thing of the pastand
that leads directly to greater job satisfaction and better quality of
life for developers.
Operations
Theres a widespread belief that system administrators constantly
obsess about system stabilityand in fact, its true. Their night-
mare scenario is a software release that takes down the system
within seconds of production deployment, developers who shrug off
responsibility (Its your code now!), users in various degrees of out-
rageand no clear path to a quick, effective resolution.
Early adopters of DevOps methods have found that the increased
involvement by developers actually improves system stability. Auto-
mation also helps by eliminating human errors common in manual
operations, and has the added benefit of reducing the amount of
time spent on routine tasks. Theres a quality of life issue for system
administrators as well, in the form of skill building, career opportu-
nities, and a great deal more uninterrupted sleep and personal time.
In a DevOps environment, operations rely on tools to a much greater
extent than in traditional environment, often building their own tools
and writing scripts that automate portions of the deployment process.
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eBook Navigating DevOps: Learn What It Is and Why It Matters To Your Business

Test Engineers An effective DevOps strategy allows an organization to analyze, for

The impact that DevOps has had on the testing side of the house can the first time and in real-time, Web analytics data, machine data,

be summed up in two words: Chaos Monkey. Netflix developed this and existing structured data to achieve a 360-degree view of how

remarkable, innovative tool to break its own software!29 customer-facing systems are and are not delivering business value.
DevOps allows organizations to understand the behavior of indi-

Chaos Monkey works on the principle that the best way to avoid vidual customers, what actions they take and how their behavior

major failures is to fail constantly. The software simulates failures compares to that of other customers. It allows an organization to

of instances of servicesby shutting down one or more of the vir- perform what-if analyses of changes to their user interface or prod-

tual machinesIn this way, its possible to prepare for major unex- uct offers. Based on the results of these predictive analyses, and

pected errors rather than just waiting for catastrophe to strike and of actual field experience, the Agile development side of DevOps

seeing how well you can manage. 30 then allows organizations to respond to market needs more quickly
than ever before. 31

DevOps requires new ways to test software, which challenges test

engineers to innovate on their side of the houseexactly the impetus Lets break that down a bit. In a DevOps environment, business stake-

that led to the creation of Chaos Monkey. With automated provision- holders have greater influence on the development process. Thanks

ing, test engineers can provision a test environment that is virtually to the collaborative spirit of DevOps, developers actually care about

identical to the production environment, resulting in more accurate business requirements and foster relationships with product manag-

testing and better ability to predict the performance of new releases. ers. DevOps also gives product managers immediate feedback about

As with other groups, test engineer productivity increases thanks to the impact of new pricing, features, and product bundles, which

automation and collaboration. allows them to test variations and gauge their effectiveness.

Line of business (LOB) managers love DevOps because software gets

Product Managers
to market fastergiving them the competitive edge that they crave.
Technically, DevOps is just about the IT function of the enterprise.
Because DevOps improves system stability, customers experience
However, those who have made the transition will tell you that
fewer outages and are therefore more loyalthe perfect cure for high
DevOps changes everything:
churn rates.

29 http://techblog.netflix.com/2012/07/chaos-monkey-released-into-wild.html.
30 Margaret Rouse, Chaos Monkey, WhatIs.com, http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/Chaos-Monkey, August 2013.
31 Kapil Apshankar, How DevOps Drives Real-Time Business Growth, Cognizant white paper, http://www.cognizant.com/InsightsWhitepapers/How-DevOps-Drives-Real-Time-Business-Growth.pdf , 2013.

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eBook Navigating DevOps: Learn What It Is and Why It Matters To Your Business

Executives
When Patrick Debois and other IT wizards started the DevOps move- My mindset was to slow down the release process.
ment, they surely werent concerned with how it would be received in I wanted to have as few releases as possible so
the corporate boardroom. Just five years later, DevOps is a hot topic that I could be sure that the system would be sta-
in those same boardrooms. ble. After working for several years in a DevOps
environment, Ive done a complete 180 degree
What do executives like about DevOps? For one thing, it helps the turn. Now my philosophy is, the more frequently
organization deliver high-quality products and get them to market we deploy, the better.32
much faster than competitors with traditional methods of software Aaron Bento, Site Reliability Engineer, New Relic
developmentactions that impact the bottom line and build brand
value. Another reason is the ability to attract and retain top talent:
high-quality developers, system administrators, and test engineers
want to work on the latest and greatest. Finally, when developers,
operations, and QA work together, top executives rarely get pulled
into inter-departmental disputes, leaving them more time to craft the
focused business goals that everyone is now pulling together to reach
successfully.

32 Interview, February 6, 2014

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CHAPTER 7

How Will I Benefit

from DevOps?

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eBook Navigating DevOps: Learn What It Is and Why It Matters To Your Business
How Will I Benefit from DevOps?
Credible sources report some pretty remarkable benefits achieved
with DevOps. However, caution is in order. Suppose you overheard
someone saying, Im getting 30 miles to the gallon. What car? What
kind of driving? If hes talking about an F-150 truck driven off-road,
the number is so high that you simply wouldnt believe it. On the other
hand, for a new Prius driven exclusively on the highway, 30 mpg would
indicate big problems. Context matters. So whenever you encounter
claims about improvements related to DevOps, be aware that your
results may vary.
That said, a survey by Puppet Labs33 found that DevOps adopt-
ers release software 30 times faster than their peers. The quality of
the software products is higher, too, as shown by the finding that
DevOps applications have half the failures of competitors. Finally, the
33 PuppetLabs survey, op cit.
21 2014 New Relic, Inc | US +888-643-8776
net effect on system stability is positive: when the platform does go
down, DevOps groups restore service 12 times faster than peers.
One thing is obvious: IT professionals who have adopted DevOps
tend to be raving fans. Its not hard to see why, given the improve-
ments cited in the same study:
Infrastructure stability: 83 percent of respondents report
either some improvement or significant improvement.
App deployment speed: 83 percent report either some
improvement or significant improvement.
Security: 45 percent expect DevOps to improve security,
while only 7 percent think that systems will be less secure
thanks to DevOps.
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eBook Navigating DevOps: Learn What It Is and Why It Matters To Your Business

Conclusion
Five years into the great DevOps experiment, the data is clear: DevOps need the ability to accurately monitor all the changes going on in
is here to stayand for some very good reasons. Many thought it your environment. New Relic provides the data you need to measure
impossible, but DevOps has succeeded in integrating business users, and monitor the new features the Dev team delivers, while ensuring
developers, test engineers, and system administrators into a single the stability that the Ops team requires. To learn more about DevOps
workflow focused on meeting customer requirements. Why would they and how New Relic can help your organization successfully make the
willingly do so? Because theres something in it for everyone. Developers transition, visit: http://newrelic.com/devops.
and system administrators stop arguing and start supporting each other,
lowering blood pressures all around. Business managers are happy
because they actually get the software products that they need to
One of the best messages that DevOps has
for all of us is, if you dont like the way some-
sell products and services. Executives watch their beloved dashboard
ones doing something, talk to them and find
metricsrevenue, customer satisfaction, system reliabilityheading
out why. Youll probably learn that there were
steadily north. And everyone is able to deliver the best results and overall great reasons for everything, including I didnt
experience possible to the customer. know how to do it.34
Sascha Bates, Consultant, Chef
Gains like these, however, dont come easily. In order to successfully
deploy code more frequently while keeping your systems humming, you

34 Sascha Bates, Shenanigans, http://blog.brattyredhead.com/, May 17th, 2013.

22 2014 New Relic, Inc | US +888-643-8776 | www.newrelic.com | www.twitter.com/newrelic | blog.newrelic.com

eBook Navigating DevOps: Learn What It Is and Why It Matters To Your Business

About New Relic

New Relic is a software analytics company that makes sense of billions of metrics about millions of applications in real time. Our comprehensive SaaS-based solution provides
one powerful interface for web and native mobile applications and consolidates the performance monitoring data for any chosen technology in your environment. Our 90,000
customers use our cloud solution every day to optimize more than 200 billion metrics for 3 million applications. When your brand and customer experience depend on the
performance of modern software, New Relic provides insight into your overall environment. Learn more at newrelic.com.

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